User:Arms & Hearts/Newell Bringhurst

Newell Bringhurst is an American historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Life
He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Career
He completed his bachelors and masters degrees at the University of Utah. His master's thesis was on the American mining entrepreneur and politician George H. Dern. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Davis in 1975, writing a thesis on the history of attitudes to black people in the LDS Church, which was later published as Saints, Slaves and Blacks (1981). Bringhurst subsequently held a temporary post at Boise State University.

He is currently a Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, California.

Saints, Slaves and Blacks (1981)
Saints, Slaves and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People within Mormonism, published by Greenwood Press in 1981, is a study of black people's role in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the LDS Church or Mormon Church). The book traces the origins of LDS ideas about race, their development, and their significance for the church's practice between 1820 and 1980. Bringhurst identifies three themes in pre-1865 Mormon racial thought: a belief, derived from Mormon scripture, that dark skin was a form of divine punishment; a belief that abolitionism and expansionist proslavery politics both represented dangerous extremes; and the practice of barring black people from the Mormon priesthood. With regard to the post-1865 period, Bringhurst examines the church's unwillingness to deploy missionaries in support of black people abroad, the church's views on the African-American Civil Rights Movement, anti-black discrimination in Utah, and the 1978 admission of black people to the priesthood. Bringhurst examines the effects of polygamy, the Utah War of 1857–58, and the American Civil War and Reconstruction on Mormon beliefs about race, and argues that Mormon racial ideas and practices had their origins in the leadership of Joseph Smith, but only became institutionalized under the leadership of Brigham Young. Bringhurst also argues that Mormon ideas about race were not primarily derived from religious doctrine, but rather from the cultural environments in which Mormons found themselves. Saints, Slaves, and Blacks was based on Bringhurst's doctoral thesis.

Richard P. Howard, writing in The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal, wrote that "Bringhurst skillfully handles the complex development of racism, anti-slavery attitudes, antiabolitionism, and the controversial origins of the Black priesthood denial" in the book's first five chapters, though his treatment of the "larger social forces" affecting Mormon views on race "is only partly developed". Lester B. Scherer, reviewing the book in The American Historical Review, described it as "an excellent treatment of an important part of American religious life" that "succeeds in showing the Mormons as a microcosm of the American population." Dennis L. Lythgoe wrote in The Journal of American History that though the book is "the most complete single source work to date on the subject", Bringhurst is "cursory in his treatment of sources and issues" and exhibits "an extreme anti-Mormon bias". Lythgoe concluded: "it remains for another scholar, more objective, more discriminating with sources, and more gifted with interpretative history, to write the definitive work on blacks and Mormonism." In the Western Historical Quarterly Henry J. Wolfinger described the book as "a valuable contribution to Mormon history" and "essential reading for anyone interested in the development of Mormon racial policies", but questioned Bringhurst's account of the importance of abolitionist sentiment within the Church after 1844 and his focus on internal forces within the Church rather than national phenomena. Charles S. Peterson, discussing Saints, Slaves, and Blacks in the journal Arizona and the West, wrote that "One senses that the entire record is presented here, sometimes to the extent that organizational and interpretive apparatus are overwhelmed", and concluded that "the book not only fills a place in the story of Western race relations, but makes a significant contribution to Mormon historiography." S. George Ellsworth, reviewing the book for the Pacific Historical Review, described it as "invaluable for Mormon studies" and "valuable also to all students of institutions and cultural change." Gordon D. Morgan, in The Journal of Negro History, wrote that "This book should be required reading in religion, sociology, or other classes where the attempt is to understand the relationships of men to men." In the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the sociologist James T. Richardson described the book as "readable and filled with mountains of detailed information", and praised Bringhurst's application of "a sociological perspective" in his historical study. The sociologist Armand Mauss, in the Review of Religious Research, criticised the book for failing "to develop an adequate comparative context within which to understand and assess the uniqueness of early Mormon racism", but praised the book for its detail, its explanation of how racism entered into Mormonism, and its appendices.

Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier (1986)
Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1986, is a short biography of Brigham Young, who was President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 to 1877. The book documents the conditions in Vermont at the time of Young's birth there in 1801 (see History of Vermont § Admission to the Union, his contribution to Mormonism from 1832 (when he joined the Church), and his role in Mormon migrations to Missouri, Illinois, and ultimately to the Salt Lake Valley in present-day Utah (see Mormon pioneers. Bringhurst also consider's Young's personal religious experiences, his relationship with his multiple wives, and his attitudes towards Native Americans (see History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints § The church and Native Americans) and the U.S. federal government. Bringhurst's reassessment of Young's significance involves the claim that Young was "one of the greatest colonizers in American history".

The biographer and historian Valeen Tippetts Avery wrote in the Western Historical Quarterly that the book "is a breathless account of [Young]'s accomplishments year after year and crisis after crisis, but somehow the wily Brigham eludes his grasp," and argued that book "becomes a catalog of what the man did rather than a chronicle of who the man was", though an impressive one. The historian Thomas G. Alexander, writing in the Journal of the Early Republic, described the book as "excellent" and praised its "balance and scope." In The American Historical Review Klaus J. Hansen identified the book as "an excellent introduction" to Young and his Mormonism, but suggested that Bringhurst could have engaged with debates over whether Young was a quintessentially American figure, or an idiosyncratic or even "un-American" one. The historian Marvin S. Hill praised the book as "interesting and balanced", and lacking "the antagonism toward Mormonism that has characterized some previous works", but queried Bringhurst's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in the development of Mormonism. In the Pacific Historical Review, Charles S. Peterson characterized the book as "in the main" a success, but criticized its failure to offer an account of how and why Young changed over time.

Bringhurst later commented that the book suffered from being published soon after Leonard J. Arrington's American Moses: The Life of Brigham Young, which led to its being "largely ignored and overlooked by scholars and lay persons alike, particularly within the Mormon community."

Fawn McKay Brodie (1999)
Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer's Life, a biography of the American biographer Fawn M. Brodie, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1999. Much of Bringhurst's research between 1986 and 1987 was focused on Brodie, including eleven articles and an edited volume on Brodie's No Man Knows My History. In the preface to the book Bringhurst comments on parallels between Brodie's life and his own: their having married outside of the LDS Church, their rejection of the denial of the priesthood to black people, and their reluctance to accept the historicity of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham. The book took Bringhurst 13 years to complete, which he attributed to his teaching obligations, the fact that other scholars were researching Brodie's life and career at the same time, opposition from Brodie's family, and opposition from his own family.

Like Brodie's own biographies, Bringhurst employs a psychobiographical approach to his subject. Bringhurst moves chronologically through Brodie's life, from her birth in Ogden, Utah in 1915 to her death in California in 1981, via her youth and early education, her time at the University of Utah and later the University of Chicago, her marriage to Bernard Brodie. Rather than dwelling on Brodie's reputation as a Mormon heretic, Bringhurst tells Brodie's story as that of a wife and mother, and asserts that "family and children were without doubt, Brodie's first priority". Bringhurst draws on the papers of Brodie and her husband, the editorial files of her publishers Alfred A. Knopf and W. W. Norton & Company, and her personal correspondence. The book also contains a bibliography of Brodie's published works.

The historian David J. Whittaker, reviewing the book in Brigham Young University Studies, praised Bringhurst's "attempt to present a full portrait of a life", and the book's insight into Brodie's marriage, her relationship with her children, her environmental activism, her academic career, and her relationship with her family and religious heritage. Whittaker suggests, however, that Bringhurst ought to have examined the influence of literature on Brodie's life and thought, criticizes Bringhurst's failure to properly evaluate or analyze Brodie's biographies, and concludes that the book is "adequate". Brigham D. Madsen, in the Journal of Mormon History, praised the book as "admirable" and Bringhurst as "very skillful in portraying Brodie as very much alive, unlike the stick figures of too many lives of the famous." In the Southern California Quarterly, Andrew Rolle described the book as Bringhurst's best. Janet Ellingson, writing in the Western Historical Quarterly, noted that Bringhurst's use of Brodie's psychoanalytically-informed style "fails ... to go beyond the oft-repeated notation that Brodie's fascination with the sexual lives of her subjects had something to do with her own inhibited sexuality", and suggests the book "would have been more entertaining" had Bringhurst been willing "to take imaginative flights with plot and characters." The biographer and historian Valeen Tippetts Avery, in The Journal of Arizona History, similarly found Bringhurst's psychoanalytic approach unconvincing, but praised the book as "nicely written, carefully researched, finely nuanced in many ways, and balanced in its conclusion ... an important book in Mormon and women's studies."

Fawn McKay Brodie received the Mormon History Association's Ella Larsen Turner Award for the Best Biography in Mormon History in 1999.

Excavating Mormon Pasts (2004)
Excavating Mormon Pasts: The New Historiography of the Last Half Century, edited by Bringhurst and Lavina Fielding Anderson and published by Greg Kofford Books in 2004, comprises 16 essays on developments in the field of Mormon studies from 1950 to 2004 (see New Mormon history). Each essay deals with a specific aspect of Mormonism: for example, its history, the role of women in the Church, and the role of polygamy. The essays are variously historical narratives, accounts of historical debates, and evaluations of major works. The book includes essays by Anderson, Davis Bitton, Bringhurst, Todd Compton, Danny Jorgensen, Roger D. Launius, Glen M. Leonard and David L. Paulsen, among others.

A review in Publishers Weekly concluded: "Students of Mormonism will find this collection of historiographical essays an invaluable addition to their libraries." Edward A. Warner, writing in The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal, queried the catgorization of the book as a work of historiography and argued it was more valuable as one of bibliography, but concluded that the book "is an enormous and invaluable resource for either the historian or educated layperson". In the Western Historical Quarterly the historian Kathryn M. Daynes described the book as "packed with useful information and valuable insights ... both an enjoyable book to read and an important reference book." Quincy D. Newell, in the journal Church History, wrote that "the thoroughness with which the authors discuss their topics makes this book a valuable reference work," but questioned the inclusion of Anderson's essay on Mormon historical novels. The historian William D. Russell, in an extended review of the book in the Journal of Mormon History, described it as "a valuable collection of bibliographical essays ... each one written by an expert in the area", and praised essays by Anderson, Guy Bishop,, Compton, and Stephen LeSeur in particular.